Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Symposium: Showing and Writing Training


On Showing and Writing Training: A Symposium
Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance
Royal Holloway, University of London
Wednesday, 30 November 
14:00 to 17:00 

What is the difference between what you do and how you talk about what you do?
What remains unsaid? What remains undone? What gets undone?
What is impossible to explain?
Who do you think you're talking to?

The special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 'On Showing and Writing Training' (eds.) Dick McCaw and guest-editor Mary Paterson, brings together writing, improvisation, experimentation and images to explore how performance is made manifest, represented and reproduced through training. In doing so, the journal addresses wider questions about pedagogy, the live and the remembered in relation to the practices of art. This afternoon of discussions aims to celebrate the special issue and further explore these ideas. The event will feature an artist's response from the performer Karen Christopher, as well as talks and provocations from John Hall, Franc Chamberlain, Ysabel Clare, Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Joa Hug and other contributors.